With the credit crunch ever looming and the media almost willing it to get worse, the main worry everyone has right now is how to save money. We have all watched as the housing market took a tumble only for it to stabilise in the future, but the housing market is always going to be a secure means of investment. What is certain to change is how people go about it.

UKHousing provide a different solution to saving money on selling your home. Managing the sale of your own property might seem like a break from the traditional use of estate agents, but with the right guidance and the best means to display your house the savings are yours for the taking. With 70% of house hunters going online to look for properties, there’s never been a better way for private house sales or private renting direct.  Marketing your home without a traditional estate agent is an easy way to save thousands.

UKHousing aim to make selling your home easy and they provide a wealth of information and advice on the best means to do this. Everything from a buyer’s guide to a seller’s guide and the most important Home Information Packs. Selling a property with UKHousing.com is a great way to save money, with prices starting from nothing!  But for those who want to take that extra step towards finding a buyer privately, there are a range of low cost and effective optional extras to help you quickly find a buyer. This service also extends to Private Letting. UKHousing specialise in providing people the means to advertise their property to rent privately with low cost options to help you find a tennant quickly.
Remember, the key to selling your home privately is not to be afraid to barter and knowing the true market value of your property, remembering that your home is only worth what someone is willing to pay.

Being in the business of search engine optimisation, we’re very focussed on getting people to the first page of Google and keeping them there. So it’s quite alarming for us when one of our clients suddenly sees their site drop after several months of good progress. This has just happened to Mobility Buddy.

We’ve been working on the site for nearly 6 months now and have been achieving some really good results, consistently moving up the rankings getting first page results in Google, Yahoo and MSN for terms such as disabled scooters, lightweight wheelchairs and Shoprider Sovereign, their top selling scooter. This month we’ve noticed a significant drop in the Google rankings although Yahoo and MSN have continued to improve.

So, why has it dropped out? We’re looking into this issue with utter focus and determination to try to find that answer. We keep a detailed diary each month of all SEO activities which we will go through with a fine-tooth comb to attempt to deduce what has happened – has something we have done had a negative effect on the site?

One of the great problems with ongoing SEO activity like this is that it is very difficult to pinpoint what effect a particular element of promotion has had: did that Digg submission work? Or was it the 10 links I build this morning? Or was it after I changed the Title tag?

We’ll go through everything now though and hopefully the next time I post on here about Mobility Buddy it’ll be with news of a triumphant return!

Anything Facebook can do, we can do better!
We’ve just launched our own social network / extranet based around the Ning framework: http://metafocus.ning.com/

We’re planning on using this as our own personal version of Facebook to send messages, share video and photos, live chat (yes, I know we all sit together anyway..) and plan events.

The Ning system is extremely powerful and easy to setup with a basic system up and running within minutes. Of course, the fun part is customising it to your own requirements, branding and look and feel.As with any extranet, forum, blog or social network, the key to its success is to use it regularly. The only reason that Facebook has become so successful is because it is successful, in other words because your freinds are already on there, you want to be on there and want your other friends to be on there. We need to keep this up to date and make good use of it if it is going to really work for us.

If you’re interested in getting one for your business, drop me an email at richard@metafocus.co.uk and we can talk through the various options with you.